Asus Crosshair IV Extreme

Overclocking

Overclocking with the Crosshair IV Extreme was a pleasant enough experience. The board executed overclocks with minimal fuss, but was also capable of recovering itself whenever an overclock was too much for it.

Our HTT overclocking spree hit a brick wall at 350MHz. While this is an impressive enough result it is not exactly ground breaking either. A Max HTT of 300-350MHz will allow you to overclock any Athlon II/Phenom II to its (air cooled) limits but this particular sample is far from the best when the cheaper MSI 870A Fuzion Power Edition achieved a tastey 400MHz max.

Overclocking - Max Overall

After some further tweaking, we were able to push our 1090T Black Edition to 4.38GHz bootable, please ignore the 700 HT speed as this just seemed to be a strange quirk with our version of CPUZ and the board the correct value is actually 2100MHz. This of course was not stable and once again fell short of the MSI with its max bootable frequency of 4.50GHz dead.

For benchmarking purposes, we reached an optimum clock frequency of 4.03GHz, with the parameters of 350MHz * 11.5x. All in all, not a poor show from the Crosshair IV Extreme, although there is no denying that we expected much more. Regardless, let the testing begin.

Most Recent Comments

Good review as usual though it did seem a little short. I had a bad feeling regarding the actively cooled heatsink when i first looked at the board a few weeks back, out of interest how hot does it get when the fan is unplugged? Hydra performance is thankfully better than i expected too. At £250 its not cheap especially with AMD's new none compatible CPU's coming quite soon. Never the less I will give this board some serious consideration for my new build.Quote

I must admit that I'm not a fan of the ROG motherboards. I liked the CHIV but this one goes too far with add on crap that's all a bit pointless.

I mean sure, if you are a gadget freak then it may appeal to you, but the bottom line on a board of this cost is function. Function should come over form as it does with the MSI.

Yet it wasn't even able to match the MSI's bottom line function.

So all of the stick on tat does very little if it is being compared to what I would call a budget board.

It was the same with my CHII ROG. Loads of stupid tat (The LED poster for one) that was fun for about five minutes and then got old fast. The only thing I really liked on that board that explained away the premium price was the cmos reset on the IO shield - that was bloody marvellous. But the rest? I ended up disconnecting the LED poster after about six boots never to use it again.

And then I got my M3A32 deluxe wifi which was also a very expensive board, yet doesn't have any silly bits on and has far more to offer in the way of function.

Again I suppose Asus are going to cater to many people with this board, but what with this, the Ares, the Mars II (if it ever comes along) and that add in board previewed today I just worry sometimes that they are being a bit over indulgent and started to fritter away their successes on stupid stuff.

It's all starting to seem a little... How do you say it?... EVGA.

Sorry if I sound harsh or pessimistic, I am only thinking aloud. But I think this time MSI have shown that stuff like this and EVGA boards are all rather pointless.

hi, i wanted to know if any of you readers, or even tom could tell me if this mobo is able to boot from a PCI e slot. im looking to build a system and have been hoping this board comes out, but was set on getting the formula. the only thing holding me back was the fact that it couldnt boot from pcie. i was planning on an OCZ RevoDrive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227597) but on the OCZ site, it states, "-Asus Crosshair IV  Please check with motherboard manufacturer for BIOS update to enable boot over PCIe." basically, with the new board, has the bios been updated to allow pci e booting? or am i still SOL...Quote

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